On Materialist Dialectic

Vladimir Ilich Lenin declared two years
ago in his article "Under the Banner of Marxism," published in issue
no. 21 of the journal Communist International, that one of the two
great tasks which communism must deal with in the field of ideology is
"to organize a systematic study of Hegel’s dialectic from a
materialist standpoint; that is to say, the dialectic which Marx so
successfully employed in a concrete manner not only in Capital but also
in his historical and political works." Lenin then did not share the
great anxiety that someone just might "via the idealist philosophy of
neo-Hegelianism" smuggle "ideological byways" into Marxist-communist
theory-an anxiety which is commonly voiced today by many of our leading
comrades as soon as anyone at any time tries to undertake a practical
attempt to engage himself in this program of Lenin's. A few examples
might prove this contention: when a year ago, for the first time in 80
years, the Meiner Publishing Company published an edition of the larger
Hegelian Logic, a formal warning appeared in the Red Flag, May 20,
1923, of the danger this new Hegel would pose to all those who, in
studying Hegel's dialectic, "lacked a critical knowledge of the whole
history of philosophy and moreover an accurate familiarity with the
main results and methods of the natural sciences since Hegel's time".
Eight days later, in the Red Flag of May 27, 1923, another
representative of the faction then practically and theoretically
dominant in the KPD formally condemned Georg Lukacs for his attempt, by
way of a collection of essays, to "provide the beginning or even just
the occasion for a genuinely profitable discussion of dialectical
method." The scientific journal of the German party, the
Internationale, completely ignored the whole book by Lukacs for reasons
of simplicity. Bela Kun, in his essay on "The Propagation of Leninism"
in the latest issue (no. 33) of the Communist International, not only
draws attention to deviations already current but moreover observes
that "some Communist publicists, as yet without a political name, could
deviate in the near future into revisionist bylaws, departing from
orthodox Marxism." (!)

After these examples, of which there are many, one might
suggest that the detailed demand-which Lenin raised earlier and lastly
in the essay of 1922-that in our work of Communist enlightenment we
must organize a systematic study from a materialist standpoint, not
only of the dialectical method of Marx and Engels but also of "Hegel's
dialectic," did not meet with very much understanding in the leading
theoretical circles of the Comintern, and still less among the
theoreticians of the German Communist party. When we look for the
causes of this phenomenon we must make distinctions. To one faction
(typified by Bukharin's book The Theory of Historical Materialism) the
whole of "philosophy" has fundamentally already reached a point that in
reality it was to reach only in the second phase of Communist society
after the full victory of the proletarian revolution, viz. the
transcended standpoint of an unenlightened past. These comrades believe
that the question of "scientific" method is solved once and for all in
the empirical methods of the natural sciences and the corresponding
positive-historical method of the social sciences. Little do they
realize that just this method, which was the war-cry under which the
burgher class undertook its struggle for power from the beginning, is
also today still the specific bourgeois method of scientific research,
which, it is true, is sometimes theoretically renounced by the
representatives of modern bourgeois science in the present period of
the decline of bourgeois society, but which in practice will be clung
to.

To the other faction this matter is more complicated. Here
people see a "danger" in a however "materialistically" turned
occupation with Hegel’s dialectical method for the reason
that they know only too well this danger from their own experience, and
indeed secretly become its victims as often as they are exposed to it.
This perhaps somewhat bold sounding assertion will not only be
illustrated but proven outright by the example of a little article, "On
the Matter of Dialectic," by A. Thalheimer, published in International
S, no. 9 (May 1923), and at the same time also in the information
sheets of the Communist Academy in Moscow. In this article, Comrade
Thalheirner links up with Franz Mehring's thesis-which I share and hold
tenable-that from the Marxist dialectical-materialist standpoint it is
no longer practical and factually not even possible to deal with this
"materialist dialectical" method separated from a concrete "matter."
Comrade Thalheimer declares that although Mehring's rejection of an
abstract treatment of the dialectical method represents as such a
correct nucleus, it nevertheless "oversteps its goal." To work out a
dialectic is "an urgent necessity," inter alia, because "in the most
progressive parts of the world proletariat the need arises to create a
comprehensive and orderly world-view (!), something that lies beyond
the practical demands of the struggle and the building of socialism,"
and this, furthermore, contains within itself "the demand for a
dialectic." Comrade Thalheimer then goes on that in composing such a
dialectic one ought to critically link up with Hegel "not only in
relation to the method, but also to the matter." The genial
progressiveness of Hegel is his demand that "the inner, all-embracing
systematic connection of all categories of thinking be revealed." This
task would apply equally to the materialist dialectic. Hegel's method
need only be turned over; by which a materialist dialectic would emerge
that would determine not reality by thought but rather thought by
reality.

We believe that in all their brevity these words of Comrade
Thalheimer prove conclusively that he is altogether incapable of
imagining the dialectical method in any other way than an
Hegelian-idealist one. Nevertheless far be it from us to say that
Comrade Thalheimer is an idealist dialectician. We have stated
elsewhere ("Lenin and the Comintern") that Comrade Thalheimer avows an
apparently materialistic-dialectical method in a later essay which is
in reality not dialectical at all but is pure positivism. We can here
supplement this statement by saying that as far as Comrade Thalheimer
is a dialectician he is an idealist dialectician and conceives the
dialectical method in no other than its Hegelian-idealist form. And the
proof thereof we wish to arrive at positively by stating what in our
conception constitutes the essence of materialist dialectic, that is,
Hegel’s dialectic applied materialistically by Marx and
Lenin. In doing so, we connect with the results of our earlier
published investigations on the relation of Marxism and Philosophy.

It is high time to dispense with the superficial notion that
the transition from the idealist dialectic of Hegel to the materialist
dialectic of Marx would be such a simple matter as to he achieved by a
mere "overturning," a mere "turning upside down," of a method remaining
other' wise unaltered. There are certainly some generally known
passages in Marx where he himself characterized in this abstract way
the difference of his method from Hegel's as a mere contrast. However,
whoever does not determine the meaning of Marx's method from these
quotations, but instead delves into Marx's theoretical practice, will
soon easily see that this "transition" in method, like all transitions,
represents not a mere abstract rotation, but rather has a rich concrete
content.

At the same time as classical economics developed the theory
of value in the "mystified" and abstract unhistorical form of Ricardo,
classical German philosophy also made the attempt, in a likewise
mystical and abstract manner, to break through the barriers of
bourgeois philosophy. Like Ricardo's theory of value, the "dialectical
method" developed at the same time in the revolutionary epoch of
bourgeois society, and already shows in its consequences the way beyond
bourgeois society (just as the practical revolutionary movement of the
bourgeoisie also partly aimed beyond bourgeois society before and until
the proletarian revolution movement was to confront it
"independently"). But all these perceptions brought forward by
bourgeois economics and bourgeois philosophy had yet to remain in the
last instance "pure" perceptions, their concepts the "reconstituted
being," their theories nothing but passive "reflections" of this being,
real "ideologies" in the narrow and more precise sense of this Marxian
expression. Bourgeois economics and bourgeois philosophy could well
recognize the "contradictions," the "antinomies" of the bourgeois
economy and bourgeois thought, and could even illuminate them with the
greatest of clarity, yet in the end the contradictions prevailed. It is
only the new science of the proletarian class which can break this ban,
a science that unlike bourgeois science is no longer just "pure"
theoretical science, but is revolutionary practice at the same time.
The political economy of Karl Marx and the materialist dialectic of the
proletarian class lead in their practical application to a dissolution
of these contradictions in the reality of social life, and thereby at
the same time in the reality of thought which is a real component of
this social reality. It is thus we must understand Karl Marx when he
credits proletarian class consciousness and his materialist-dialectical
method with a power that the method of bourgeois philosophy never
possessed, not even in its last, richest and highest Hegelian
development. Just for the proletariat, just for it and only for it,
will it be possible, through the development of its class consciousness
become practical in tendency, to overcome that fetter of a still
remaining "immediacy" or "abstraction" which for all purely perceiving
behavior, for Hegel's idealist dialectic as well, clearly remains
standing in the final analysis in insuperable "contradictions." It is
here, and not in a merely abstract "inversion" or "turning upside
down," that lies the revolutionary further development of the idealist
dialectic, of classical bourgeois philosophy, into that materialist
dialectic which has been theoretically conceptualized by Karl Marx as
the method of a new science and practice of the proletarian class, and
has been applied in theory and practice alike by Lenin.

When we look at the "transition" from Hegel's bourgeois
dialectic to the proletarian dialectic of Marx-Lenin from this
historical viewpoint, we immediately grasp the complete absurdity of
the notion that an independent "system" of materialist dialectic is
possible. Only an idealist dialectician could undertake an attempt to
free the totality of forms of thought (determinations of thought,
categories)-which are in part consciously applied in our practice,
science, and philosophy, and in part move through our minds
instinctively and unconsciously-from the material which is the subject
of our intuiting, imagining and yearning, and in which they are
otherwise shrouded, and then to examine it as a separate material in
itself. The last and greatest of the idealist dialecticians, the
burgher Hegel, had already partly seen through the "untruth" of this
standpoint and had "introduced content into logical reflection (see his
preface to the second Lasson edition of the Logic, p. 6). But this
abstract method is completely absurd for the materialist dialectician,
Apart from its respective concrete historical content a real
"materialist" dialectic can state nothing at all about the
determinations of thought and the relations between them. Only from the
standpoint of the idealist and thus bourgeois dialectic is it possible
to fulfill Thalheimer's demand according to which dialectics would have
to map out the connection of the determinations of thought as an
"inner, all-round, systematic connection of all the categories of
thought." Rather, from the standpoint of the materialist dialectic that
sentence which Karl Marx once voiced in relation to "economic
categories" is to be applied to the connection of categories or
determinations of thought in general: they stand to one another not in
a connection "in the idea" (for which "washed out notion" Marx thrashed
Proudhon!), not in an "inner systematic connection," but even their
apparently purely logical and systematic sequence is "determined
through the relations which they have to one another m modern bourgeois
society." With the alteration of historical reality and practice the
determinations of thought and all their connections also alter. To
overlook their historical context and to wish to bring the
determination of thought and their abstract relations into a system
means the surrender of the revolutionary proletarian materialist
dialectic in favor of a mode of thought which is only
"materialistically" inverted in theory, but which in practical reality
remains the old, unchanged, "idealist" dialectic of bourgeois
philosophy. The "materialist dialectic" of the proletarian class cannot
be taught as a practical "science" with its own particular abstract
"material," nor by so-called examples. It can only be applied
concretely in the practice of the proletarian revolution and in a
theory which is an immanent real component of this revolutionary
practice.